[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 178 (Monday, October 30, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5223-S5225]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Border Security

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last Thursday, I traveled back to my 
home State of Texas but this time to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with 
Senator Cruz--my colleague from Texas--as well as three of our non-
Texas Senate colleagues. Senators Barrasso, Lee, and Ricketts joined us 
for a series of tours and meetings in the Rio Grande Valley, which is 
unlike any other place in America.
  This has been one of many times that Senator Cruz and I have welcomed 
our colleagues to the border because every time I hear people in 
Washington, DC, talk about the border, it is most likely something they 
have gleaned from movies or a novel that they have read somewhere. It 
is not based on reality.
  And the truth is, the reality at the border has changed substantially 
from years ago when illegal immigration was primarily people coming to 
the United States to work and send money home. It has changed entirely 
to a global human smuggling enterprise that enriches the criminal 
organization to organize it, charging tens of thousands of dollars a 
head to people they smuggle into the United States. And if you come 
from special interest countries, like Iran, Syria, for example, you may 
have to pay tens of thousands of dollars, but you can still make your 
way in because of the broken border policies of the Biden 
administration, which I will talk about here in a moment.
  It really is a shame that such a beautiful, vibrant region of our 
country that has benefited tremendously from the opportunities that 
come from living along an international border has been damaged and 
hurt in such an unfortunate way by the flood of humanity and drugs 
coming across.
  Legitimate trade and travel have shaped the unique culture of our 
border and serve as a boon not just to local economies but to the 
entire American economy. But like so many other areas along the U.S.-
Mexico border, this region has become overwhelmed by the weight of the 
current border crisis.
  Last month alone, Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley Sector--just one 
of many sectors of the Border Patrol--logged more than 45,000 border 
crossings. In the last year, nearly 340,000 migrants have crossed the 
Rio Grande Valley Sector, and, overwhelmingly, the Biden administration 
has simply just released them into the interior of the United States, 
which has, in turn, proved to be a magnet for more people to come.
  If, in fact, the Biden administration wanted to deter illegal 
immigration, they would stop people from coming to

[[Page S5224]]

the border and entering the country illegally, and it would send people 
back who somehow made it over. That would act as a deterrent.
  But right now, notwithstanding the messages of people like Mayor 
Adams, from New York City, when he recently went to Mexico City, he 
said: Don't come. Don't come--well, the people who make the dangerous 
journey from their home to the border and into the interior of the 
United States, they frequently have access to this thing called 
television and to this instrument we call a telephone. So they can see 
people making their way across the border successfully, and they can 
talk to relatives who have made the trip on the telephone who say: I 
made it. You can too. Thus, we have seen this huge flood of migrants 
across the border swell into a virtual tsunami.
  It used to be that the overwhelming number of migrants came from 
Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries. And that is when I hear 
Vice President Harris and others talk--Secretary Blinken--about root 
causes, like they want to go in and nation-build in order to discourage 
people from those countries to come to the United States, which tells 
me they really don't understand the nature of the current phenomenon 
because it is not just people coming from Mexico and Central America; 
President Biden's border policies have made it so that people from 
virtually anywhere in the world can come to the southern border, say 
the magic words, and be released into the United States.
  In fact, we learned on our most recent trip that many migrants don't 
even claim asylum before they are released because there simply isn't 
enough capacity to hold them once they cross the border and then return 
them where they came from. And there aren't anywhere near enough 
removal flights to deport migrants without valid legal claims to stay 
here.
  So it is no surprise that people are traveling from all over the 
world, literally, to take advantage of this open border policy. Agents 
in the Rio Grande Valley Sector told us that they have apprehended, 
recently, migrants from China, from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, 
Nigeria, and other countries around the globe. America's southern 
border is the world's worst kept secret.
  When we arrived on Thursday night, we witnessed the sheer volume and 
diversity of migrants arriving at the border. Some of my colleagues 
spoke with a family from Moldova. You will have to look that up on your 
map. But it is not Mexico. It is not Central America. But they just 
crossed over the border moments earlier. You might ask yourself what 
would a man and his wife and their 2- or 3-year-old daughter--how did 
they make it from Eastern Europe to Texas's Rio Grande Valley. And the 
answer is simple: with human smugglers.
  Cartels and other criminal organizations have hit the jackpot with 
the Biden border crisis. Indeed, you could say that President Biden has 
outsourced U.S. immigration policy to these criminal organizations 
because they are running the show, not President Biden.
  In 2021 alone, they made an estimated $13 billion from human 
smuggling operations. That is just the human smuggling alone. Since 
then, the number of border crossings, of course, has skyrocketed. They 
get paid by the head, so that is good business for the cartels. And I 
imagine their profits have skyrocketed even further.
  Cartel smuggling operations aren't limited to Mexico and Central 
America. For the right price, these criminal organizations will help 
anyone from anywhere reach the United States and make their way into 
the interior.
  As those who have made the journey can attest, it is an extremely 
dangerous one, particularly for vulnerable women and children. Human 
smugglers don't view these migrants as fellow human beings; they view 
them as a commodity. Migrants are abused, neglected, extorted for more 
money. Women are often raped or sold for sex. Some migrants have been 
simply abandoned and left for dead if they become injured or unable to 
continue their travel.
  At one checkpoint, which is about 100 miles into the interior of 
Falfurrias, TX--it is called Brooks County--they have spent hundreds of 
thousands of dollars in this little, relatively poor, Texas county 
burying the bones of dead migrants who have died from exposure in their 
county because what happens is, once people come across the border, the 
smugglers--sometimes called coyotes--they put them in stash 
houses. Actually, we saw one stash house. And then when the time is 
right, they are loaded in the vans and then transported up the highway. 
That is the reason for the checkpoint about 100 miles inland. But what 
the coyotes do is they tell the migrants: Get out of the vehicle before 
we reach the checkpoint; walk around the checkpoint; and we will meet 
you on the north side.

  Well, for migrants who have come hundreds of miles, or further, 
already suffering from exposure to make it in the hot Texas summers, 
where it frequently exceeds 100 degrees, it should be no surprise that 
some of them--many of them, unfortunately--do not make it. So that is 
another consequence of the Biden border crisis and open border 
policies.
  And even after they cross the border, many migrants still owe massive 
debts to the cartels who will not hesitate to use them for forced labor 
or sex trafficking. In fact, if you go to parts of Houston, TX, you 
will see women who basically are sex slaves because they are working 
off their debt to the people who smuggled to get them into the interior 
of the United States in the first place.
  As I mentioned, we also visited a stash house where we saw the 
migrants awaiting the next step of their journey, and I hate to imagine 
what the cartels have in store for these individuals. But we know these 
migrants are not the only victims of the border crisis. While agents 
are busy processing and transporting migrants, it creates an open 
highway for cartels and criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the 
United States. They, of course, have spotters. They use drones for 
technology to see where the Border Patrol is and where they are not. 
And they use that knowledge to smuggle fentanyl, heroin--and God knows 
what else--across the border and into our communities.
  Here is a shocking statistic, at least it was to me. I don't know 
whether the President of the United States even knows this. But the No. 
1 killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is a synthetic 
opioid called fentanyl--leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45.
  We know where it comes from. The precursors come from China. They 
make their way to Mexico where the cartels mix them up, run them 
through industrial-capacity pill presses, and make them look like 
relatively innocuous pharmaceuticals. And then when a young man or a 
young woman, let's say, in high school, like Sienna--whose father gave 
me this rubber wristband at the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent 
School District last April--they take this, thinking, Well, it is a 
relatively innocuous pharmaceutical like Percocet or Xanax, but then 
they don't wake up the next day, of course, leaving grieving families 
wondering what in the world happened and how could this happen to them 
and their child.
  Drug overdoses alone have taken the lives of about 110,000 Americans 
a year, currently. And as I said, fentanyl is responsible for about 
two-thirds of it. Of course, we aren't just worried about substances 
coming across the border but dangerous people too: criminals, people on 
the Terrorist Watchlist, people coming from special interest countries 
like the ones I mentioned.
  It used to be that the number of people on the Terrorist Watchlist 
who were apprehended along the southern border by the Border Patrol was 
in the single digits. In the past year, at least 169 were apprehended. 
And that doesn't account for the ``got-aways.'' The ``got-aways'' are 
the 1\1/2\ million people who have been seen on cameras or detected on 
sensors but who have evaded capture by the Border Patrol. And you can 
bet that they are up to no good because they simply--if they actually 
wanted to make their way into the interior of the United States and 
didn't have a criminal record or were transporting drugs or on a 
Terrorist Watchlist, they can just--like almost everybody else under 
the Biden administration--come to the border, say the magic words, and 
the Biden administration would release them into the interior of the 
United States. But we have had 1\1/2\ million

[[Page S5225]]

``got-aways'' evade law enforcement since President Biden took office, 
including 169 people on the Terrorist Watchlist.
  It seems like a long time ago to many people, particularly if you are 
relatively young, but it was September 11, 2001, where 19 people killed 
3,000 Americans by flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon and taking down a plane over Pennsylvania.
  So 19 terrorists killed 3,000 Americans back in 2001. We know that at 
least 169 people on the Terrorist Watchlist have been apprehended so 
far. We don't know how many actually have made their way into the 
United States, but it is a safe bet it is people from countries all 
around the world where the prevailing ideology is to kill Americans in 
the United States.
  So the truth is really, depressingly, stranger than even fiction here 
because the potential for us to wake up someday and have a terrorist 
attack in our country as a result of uncontrolled migration across the 
southern border is very real, and it is growing by the day.
  Yes, there is a humanitarian and security crisis at the border, and 
it is impacting all of our country. That is the reason you have 
Senators from Nebraska and Utah and Wyoming coming to the border, 
because, as several of them said, every State is now a border State. 
Recently, one of our colleagues from Montana was there, and he said: 
You know, the fentanyl that comes across the border has made its way 
into the communities in my State, in Montana, in the northern border of 
our country.
  So every State has become a border State as a result of the Biden 
open border policy.
  We know migrants are being exploited and abused. American families 
are being terrorized by the opioid epidemic. Cities in Texas and across 
the country are struggling to keep up with the mass humanitarian needs 
of migrants. Yes, we heard from Mayor Adams from New York; we heard 
from Mayor Bowser here in Washington, DC; the mayor of Chicago; the 
Governors of Massachusetts and Illinois. This is a national crisis.
  The situation is extremely complex, but the solution doesn't have to 
be. We need deterrence through consequences. That is what the Border 
Patrol tells me and tells anybody who will listen. If there are no 
consequences to entering the country illegally, people are going to 
just keep coming. I think we all understand why. But if we are going to 
deliver consequences, which means to deter more people from coming, 
that means ending catch-and-release, which is the policy of the Biden 
administration. We need to actually remove people who have no legal 
reason to remain in the United States. That means expedited removal. We 
need to send a message to people who have no legal reasons to remain in 
the United States that if they come, they will not be able to stay. It 
is really not any more complicated than that. Congress doesn't need to 
do a rewrite of our immigration laws in order to give President Biden 
the authority to do these things. He already has that authority under 
existing law, but he won't use it.
  Deterrence is a key component of a safe and secure border. Until the 
administration starts deterring would-be migrants with frivolous asylum 
claims from even approaching our border, we will remain in a constant 
state of crisis. And I predict it will get worse. We have just seen a 
record number of people coming across the border. That number is going 
to continue to grow as more and more people know that if they show up 
at the border and say the magic words, President Biden will say: Come 
on in.
  The only way to truly understand what is happening at the border is 
to see it firsthand and to speak with the individuals who live and work 
in our border communities. I have had the pleasure, as I said earlier, 
of taking dozens of Senators, both Republicans and Democrats, down to 
the border to hear from these men and women firsthand. I appreciate all 
of our colleagues who made the trip and continue to advocate for smart 
border policies, especially, most recently, Senators Barrasso, Lee, and 
Ricketts.
  I want to thank the many men and women in the Rio Grande Valley who 
took the time out of their schedule to speak with us. Their input is 
absolutely invaluable to the work of the Senate. I am extremely 
grateful to each of them.
  I want to especially thank the law enforcement officers who are on 
the frontlines of this crisis. Every day, Federal, State, and local law 
enforcement put their lives on the line to safeguard our border and 
stop potentially dangerous individuals and drugs from reaching our 
communities, but they need our help, and they are not getting it today. 
They deserve more than our gratitude; they deserve our commitment to 
fix this crisis in any way we can.
  President Biden has not only proven himself incapable but also 
unwilling to address this border crisis, so Congress needs to step in 
and fill the void. In the coming weeks, the Senate will advance 
legislation to address some of our greatest national security threats, 
including action to address the border crisis.
  As my colleagues and I saw last week, this crisis cannot be fixed 
with more no-strings-attached funding. We will not fund current border 
policies under the Biden administration. As long as a flood of humanity 
is coming across the border at this pace, it doesn't matter how many 
Border Patrol agents or immigration judges we have; it won't be enough.
  The only way to address this crisis is by deterring more illegal 
immigration, and the simplest way of doing that is by delivering 
consequences for entering the country illegally. It is a tried-and-true 
strategy that has worked countless times before.
  In the coming weeks, I hope Congress will step in where President 
Biden has refused and establish deterrence once again.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.